Novelist, poet and playwright, her best seller, Before and After, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson.

Poet, publisher, editor, educator and a major contributor to the Black literary tradition beginning in the mid-60s, and continuing to have major influences today. Over the years, he has published 24 books (some under his former name, "Don L. Lee") and is one of the world's best-selling authors of poetry and non-fiction, with books in print in excess of 3 million.

Co-editor of the 50th Anniversary Critical Edition of Nelson Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm and the Newly Annotated Edition of Chicago: City on the Make, and has written several essays about Algren for both mainstream and scholarly publications. He is a Series Editor for Chicago Visions + Revisions, a series of nonfiction books about Chicago from the University of Chicago Press.